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Views are being sought on possible equality law reforms to be included in a promised Equality (Race and Disability) Bill.

Following on from the March 2025 consultation on disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting, the government has published a call for evidence (usually the precursor to a full-on consultation) seeking views on areas of equality policy to help better understand how the law is working in practice and on areas of possible equality law reform.

The call for evidence is wide ranging and seeks evidence and views on the following areas:

• Pay discrimination: examining the prevalence of pay discrimination based on race and disability, and ways to make the right to equal pay effective for ethnic minorities and disabled people.
• Outsourcing and equal pay: the government plans to consider ways to prevent employers from outsourcing work to avoid paying all staff equally.
• Enforcement of equal pay rights: proposing the establishment of an Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit, with trade union involvement. Also being considered is looking at how effective equal pay audits legislation has been, including how often tribunals mandate audits and how impactful the penalties are for failing to comply. 
• Pay transparency: possible implementation of pay transparency measures, such as publishing salary ranges in job ads, prohibiting employers from asking questions about salary history and ensuring employees have access to information about their own pay and how it compares to others working in similar roles or performing work of equal value in order to prevent pay discrimination.
• Combined discrimination: possibly bringing s. 14 of the Equality Act 2010 into force and seeking feedback on its potential effects. Section 14 would allow for an employee to bring a discrimination claim in relation to a combination of two relevant protected characteristics.
• Public Sector Equality Duty: ensuring all parties exercising public functions meet their equality duties.
• Workplace harassment: creating and maintaining workplaces free from harassment - this could involve extending the protection against sexual harassment under the Equality Act 2010 to volunteers and interns. Also, the Employment Rights Bill will strengthen protection from harassment, by raising the preventative duty to ‘all’ reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment and introducing liability for third-party harassment. This includes a power to make regulations specifying steps that employers must take to prevent sexual harassment, and specifying matters employers must have regard to. As ‘reasonable steps’ are not currently defined, regulations may be helpful in setting consistent minimum standards. The call for evidence says that the government will only make such regulations if there is a clear evidence base supporting the efficacy of particular steps in preventing workplace sexual harassment, and that better evidence is needed. A series of questions asks for input on effective steps, including in relation to company culture, staff training, how policies are enforced, reporting systems and procedures, and recording and investigating complaints.